I am always looking to complete my cartridge collection for my C64.Now I've obtained a cartridge named "Story Machine". Regardless of the poor presentation and functionality, I thought it should work as designed, at least you should save your work to disk and load it later again.This is the cartridge:

And this is the strange result of 4 minutes work with it:

Up to this point, I was not really impressed, but I thought, it's a rare cartridge, so who cares. Then I saved the created "story" to disk and I tried to load it again.This happens then:

What's that sh*t ?

Tested on VICE 2.22 also, with JiffyDOS Kernal and JiffyDOS C1541 ROM. Does it work better without JiffyDOS ?

Apple I auction ended with fantastic price... selled for ~half a million EURO

Monday, December 10, 2012, 09:00 AMPosted by Administrator

Almost unbelievable, what some are willed to pay.An Apple I was auctioned for a price others would buy a house instead.Original Apple I are very rare, also because only about two hundred devices were selled in 1976. A similarity to the later Apple II is easy to recognize, but only in terms of electronic design/circuits.

Not really easy to explain - original, old MOS Technology KIM-1's are much cheaper, but have almost the same historical meaning.P.S.: You can get a replica of a KIM-1 at brielcomputers.com too (named Micro-KIM) ...

Forgot these ugly limits for BIOS, DOS, FAT16 ... had to re-install a Siemens PCD-4ND

Saturday, November 24, 2012, 11:00 PMPosted by Administrator

Yes, I am getting old. I forgot these days with ugly limits for harddisk access.Not only logical limits (like FAT16 vs FAT32), also hardware limits.I have selled my Compaq Portable II last week, which was my floppy disk format conversion station (e.g. with such programs like Uniform, or 22Disk ...).Now I took my PCD-4ND notebook, a very beautiful Intel 486 based old computer, which had a 500MB harddisk - way too small:So I decided to exchange this 500MB IBM HDD with a newer Fujitsu 6.4GB HDD.Guess what happened... I noticed a strange error message from my Windows 95 Setup, something like "harddisk size parameters are wrong, no LBA support".I was a bit surprised because that Siemens PCD-4ND already had LBA support integrated in its Phoenix BIOS 1.03 from 1997.But this LBA support was not really working, a Western Digital Tool "DSKCHK" reported EXT INT13h Support is *NOT* supported by this most current available BIOS.I tried Paragon Disk Manager 5.5, and tried to "fix" this wrong MBR / disk partition table.It showed now 2GB free, but it still was not fixed for the Windows 95 Setup.

Without success I remembered there was a time special drivers were offered from Seagate or Maxtor (= Seagate Disk Manager or Maxblast).It was a bit difficult to find an appropriate version of these tools, but after I formatted and installedDisk Manager 9, it worked surprisingly without errors.

Think about how easy it is, to install new hardware and operating systems nowadays...

A replacement for rare and bad supported Catweasel Controller ? DiscFerret to the rescue ...

Friday, November 23, 2012, 07:00 PMPosted by Administrator

Sometimes a few guys seems to be very innovative.Because GCR coded (e.g. Apple II floppy diskettes) floppies can't be read from "normal" floppy disk controllers, a special device for reading even exotic floppy disk tracks is needed.A Catweasel controller is such a hardware, but it's meanwhile old and no longer supported.

Now they developed a new promising piece of hardware : DiscFerret

At the moment, there is only slow progress towards a mass production, but you can get prototype boards. You should remember the URL and visit it again.

Attention: You have to deactivate your Antivirus Software to unpack it (password for unpacking: novirus). After unpacking, upload both files to virustotal.com and see what happens. You need not to execute the exe files. After uploading it, you can reactivate your Antivirus Software (an alert for one of these two files will pop up).

patch_winver_unpacked.exe should give no negative resultspatch_winver_upx.exe should give you a lot of negative results

But these files are virtually identical, except that patch_winver_upx.exe is packed with a modified, early UPX version.You will be still able to unpack the second one manually, just take PE Explorer and you will have the possibility to save it uncompressed (it's done by a plugin of PE Explorer automatically).Why is "Heaventools Software" able to do this with ease, but any Antivirus vendor is NOT able to unpack it "on the fly" ? Even if they argue that each unpack process will take additional time, it's a lot better than giving false alarms. At least, a user should have the possibility to switch "unpacking of known exepackers" on or off.